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cweagans

> do you actually want a router that you can buy with DD-WRT pre-installed?

I don't think many people particularly care that their router has DD-WRT installed, and I also think you're asking the wrong question. Many people just want their network hardware and software to be fast and reliable. I know when I flashed DD-WRT onto my old Linksys router back in the day, it wasn't for any philosophical reason: it was that the default software was hot garbage, I didn't have the money to buy a new router, and DD-WRT promised to fix some of the problems I was running into.

(And yeah, there are _some_ people who really, really want DD-WRT on their router. They probably aren't your target customer unless you're also selling hardware that is cheaper and better than whatever they can acquire and flash themselves)

Re:The Slow Formation of Durable Software on Thursday October 08, 2026 @01:10PM (#50008592)
> I was once all-in on a note-taking app that slowly got worse and worse and it was a hassle to escape

Taking a guess here, but Evernote? :)

Re:Gleam doesn't compile to Erlang source anymore on Tuesday October 06, 2026 @12:14PM (#49980617)
You seem to be interpreting the statements as technical comparisons of the languages, but ch4s3 was (by my read) commenting on the overall ability of a programmer to jump from one language to another.

That is: they aren't similar languages on a technical level, but if you know Rust, you should be able to make the jump to Gleam pretty quickly.

Re:Reverse Engineering My ADHD Test on Tuesday September 01, 2026 @10:35AM (#49522593)
Sometimes, a little nudge is all it takes. I didn’t get diagnosed until somebody close to me asked if I’d ever been evaluated. Highly recommend finding some way to bring it up.
Re:Carl's Required Reading on Saturday August 08, 2026 @04:20PM (#49225525)
OP might also like Essentialism. Very in line with YAGNI - it guides things outside of API design too!
Re:Modern email can be built from borrowed parts on Monday July 27, 2026 @04:57PM (#49075435)
Do you have a writeup somewhere about how this system works?
Cambridge. The job market is absolute trash right now and you managed to get your foot in the door at Amazon anyway. If you can do it now, you can certainly do it with your masters later if needed.
It's important to understand that what we have, we have because of a comparatively small group of people. That's important and interesting because it means you can influence the outcome of an election in two ways:

1. Get people to change sides. This is difficult: people who already vote in a particular way are unlikely to change because of external pressures (and in fact, are more likely to dig their heels in if challenged on their views); or

2. Get more people to vote. This can be challenging in its own way, but can also just boil down to logistics problems.

Whether or not 100% voter turnout would have the same results is neither here nor there. If you accept that premise + the premise that the vast majority of American voters vote down the party line for one of the major two, then you have potentially 2x the number of voters for your desired outcome. All you have to do is go find them and get them to vote.

Re:Write code like a human will maintain it on Friday July 10, 2026 @06:53PM (#48866344)
If I’m going to be responsible for the code that Claude writes on my behalf, I’m also going to take full responsibility for the moment that it is added to the project history, so I’m going to at least review every line before I allow that to happen.

The automatic coauthor line is also just a pet peeve. It’s a tool, not a person. I don’t say that a commit was coauthored by vim - why should Claude get special treatment?

> ~50% of Americans voted for the party that is diametrically opposed to them

Less than half of the US population voted in the last election. ~50% of Americans _who voted_ voted for the party that is diametrically opposed to unions, but that group is only ~23% of _Americans_.

Re:The Ask on Thursday May 28, 2026 @12:40AM (#48304580)
Ha, excellent. I think you'll appreciate this then: https://imgflip.com/i/aswdth

I had a 50/50 chance of guessing which side of the bell curve you were on and I was wrong. :)

Re:The Ask on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @11:01PM (#48303901)
I have a theory. How close does the following describe you?

* You're an engineer with 3-6 years of experience in a primarily IC role

* Maybe you've done some tech lead stuff, but you've never actively worked in engineering management.

* You feel that management (and HR for some reason?) is constantly in the way of you getting stuff done, and that your life would be easier if you could simply decline every meeting and only communicate through pull requests.

Humor me, please. I'll explain after.

You understand how this sounds, right? It’s very “I totally have a girlfriend but she lives in Canada and is a model” vibes.

Do you have literally any proof? Otherwise, this is all just a silly made up story as far as I’m concerned.

To be clear, your claim is that 'much of the drug trade is r[u]n less than consensually' via some kind of undocumented, unknown-to-most brain implant that can be used to remotely torture people for non-compliance?

That claim falls apart as soon as it touches reality: there are a _lot_ of people who are involved in the drug trade, now and in the past. At some point, one of those people would definitely have had a CT or an MRI on their skull (e.g. my dentist does a whole head CT every 5 years as part of the normal process and insurance pays for it). Surely _one_ of those people would have noticed a brain implant.

This sounds extremely made up.

> There is a long history [...] that you will not find documented.

Then how do you know about it? This sounds extremely made up.

> Whenever you have control over somebody else's organism, suicide isn't something which makes sense definitionally, even if his own body was used to kill him.

> your vendors are likely neurocompromised as well.

What in the world are you talking about.

> If they're self-made, they earned the praise.

They aren’t and they didn’t.

> Being a self-made billionaire means they created a billion dollars of value. They didn't take it from you or anyone else.

Nobody is a “self made” billionaire. That value you’re talking about didn’t just spring into existence. It had to come from somewhere. There is always a source.

Who flew the rocket? Who built the rocket? Who built the parts for the rocket? Who mixed the fuel?

Building big ambitious things is a good thing. But consolidating an amount of money that nobody could ever reasonably spend into the hands of one person (especially when that money is just the excess value produced by the workers) is unethical and unneeded.

Re:Write some software, give it away for free on Tuesday May 05, 2026 @07:06PM (#48029938)
If you've grown a ton of tomatoes, you're probably doing it for the express purpose of profiting from it. To dial back the scope to something more comparable, if I have 4-5 tomato plants, I'm going to have all the tomatoes I want and then some. In that case, yes, I'm absolutely going to give away some tomatoes so that other people can enjoy them (as opposed to them ending up in the compost bin).
Re:Homebridge 2.0 is here, and it speaks Matter on Monday May 04, 2026 @07:08PM (#48016145)
> I just tap on that to open the relevant app, if I care to see more.

The key difference between what you're doing and what Homebridge enables is to make the relevant app the "Home" app. If all of my IoT devices are controllable (and can be automated to some degree) through a single pane of glass that I can share with my wife, that's a big improvement over "Ok, to get access to our cameras, you need to go install these three apps and log in to all of them and accept my sharing invite, etc, etc".

Yeah, you can talk to Siri to control the devices sometimes, but that is at the very very bottom of my list of benefits. I want the app UI specifically, and Homebridge enables that. (one concrete example: Ring doorbells don't play nicely with Homekit on their own, but you can install a Homebridge extension and then your doorbell camera shows up as a Homekit-compatible camera in the Home app).

Re:Your Website Is Not for You on Friday May 01, 2026 @12:45PM (#47976919)
> A patient doesn't lean over the operating table and tell the surgeon where to cut.

Web design _does_ sound much easier when clients can be anesthetized. :)

Re:Industrial design files for Keychron keyboards and mice on Saturday April 11, 2026 @02:32PM (#47732879)
Peak east coast US! You can travel three states of distance and back in a day or less on the east coast.

Three states over and back would be a day or two minimum, but potentially nearly a week on the west coast. (Depends on start and stop locations obviously, but if you start from eg Portland, three states over could be the Dakotas).

I, too, find myself wondering why this seems to be such an intractable problem. Maybe it's just misaligned incentives? That is, the phone companies really only care as much as they need to in order to prevent you leaving for another phone company.

From a technical perspective, it doesn't seem to be _that_ difficult: it seems like KYC but for anyone who wants automated access to telephone networks. I know there are some existing efforts there that are more technically comprehensive than that (SHAKEN/STIR), but I don't know where they're at in terms of adoption/rollout.

Re:CodingFont: A game to help you pick a coding font on Monday March 30, 2026 @09:17PM (#47581664)
Can you please make an image that is like 10x bigger? Like 30px font and include all the alphanumeric characters? This font looks so familiar.
Re:Stop picking my Go version for me on Monday March 30, 2026 @07:29PM (#47580981)
shrug maybe so. But then again, I can't say I'm too torn up about losing support for an EOL OS version.
Re:Stop picking my Go version for me on Saturday March 28, 2026 @08:36PM (#47559379)
In other ecosystems, I could see how this could be a problem, but I don’t think I’ve ever had a problem with a Go upgrade.

What’re the actual, practical results of a package pushing you towards a higher go version that you wouldn’t otherwise have adopted right away? Why is this actually important to avoid beyond “don’t tell me what to do”?

Re:A Eulogy for Vim on Wednesday March 25, 2026 @04:58PM (#47523163)
Sure, but that doesn't address GP's argument, which I _think_ is "there's a time and a place for those criticisms, and _literally every time emacs is brought up in a public forum_ ain't it"
Re:A Coherent Vision for the Future of Version Control on Monday March 23, 2026 @02:56PM (#47493647)
Thanks for that. I'm definitely familiar with that kind of situation, but what I'm not seeing is how that leads to history "collapsing under its own weight" in larger teams. That seems like a relatively straightforward rebase error that is easily corrected. (Also, if it is important for that list to only include unique items and you were able to merge it anyway, maybe that also reveals a gap in the test suite?)
Re:A Coherent Vision for the Future of Version Control on Monday March 23, 2026 @12:38PM (#47491836)
> it makes history a lie that eventually collapses under its own weight in large teams

Can you please elaborate on this? I've seen this argument from others as well, but nobody has ever been able to articulate what that actually looks like and why rebasing branches specifically is to blame.

My perspective: whatever happens to the commit history on your non-`main` branch is your business. I don't care about the specifics until your work is merged into a shared branch that we all understand to be the canonical representation of the software we're working on.

“I want this feature” and “I want this feature to not exist” are fundamentally incompatible viewpoints when applied to any given feature. It seems like adding that feature and making it opt-in is a good middle ground. The people that want it can have it and the people who don’t want it can pretend it doesn’t exist. This outcome seems like the result of listening to all viewpoints, so I’m not sure what problem you’re trying to point out.

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